A SHOW FOR PRESIDENT LINCOLN

 

An excerpt from Stephen Poleskie's novel THE BALLOONIST, The Story of T. S. C. Lowe, Inventor, Scientist, Magician, and Father of the U. S.

Airforce 

 

To pitch his balloon program, Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, the consummate showman, convinced some of the more venturesome of Washington’s government and army men to go aloft with him on his demonstration flights. Tethered half a mile above the Mall as the gondola swung with the wind, Lowe’s more often than not terrified passengers usually clung bare-knuckled to the sides of the fragile wicker basket. The balloonist, accustomed to the swaying, cut a brave figure as he stood there, balanced, looking through his telescope, pointing out the Federal fortifications along the river from Chain Bridge south to Alexandria.

         Soldiers could be seen digging breastworks into the dull red clay of a flowering countryside. From below the sounds of drums floated up as companies of infantry drilled with military precision between the long rows of tents. Lowe knew that no matter how frightened the man in the basket next to him might be at the moment, tonight at a fashionable dinner party he would tell a different story, speaking only of the wondrous vista he had seen, and of the clear advantage the balloon presented as a vehicle for military reconnaissance.   

         As successful as these demonstration ascensions were, they were mere rehearsals for the flight Professor Lowe planned as his piece de resistance. He proposed to take aloft a telegraph operator, with a long wire attached to the ground. From his high altitude, supposedly overlooking hostile territory, the balloonist planned to demonstrate how he could telegraph back to headquarters a description of the enemy’s position. This information could be used by draftsmen on the ground to create a virtual map of the foe’s deployment.

The morning of June 18,1861 dawned bright and clear with a calm wind. Larks fluttered in the branches of the trees, as the clouds slowly dragged their shadows across the Mall. It was the perfect day for the spectacular ascension Lowe was planning from the Columbian Armory (now significantly the site of the National Air and Space Museum). This was the flight he had announced would be dramatically different from all his previous ones. In the basket with the balloonist was Mr. Herbert Robinson, a telegraph operator who would transmit Lowe’s message, and Mr. George McDowell, in charge of the equipment lent for the occasion by the American Telegraph Company. A half-mile of telegraph wire trailed down the Enterprise’s  tether rope to another operator on the cool green lawn.

     Carried on the lips of the curious, the news rapidly spread throughout Washington that a telegraph message was to be sent from Lowe’s observation balloon to the ground. Crowds gathered in the street to witness the event. With the naked eye, onlookers could just make out Lowe in his basket, surveying the enemy entrenchments laid out beyond the Potomac River, his spyglass sweeping in a wide arc across the landscape with a grand showman’s gesture. Then the balloonist began to dictate.

          The people on the ground had become silent. Suddenly, an excitement spread through the crowd as the spectators down front heard the first tentative clicking of the Morse code signal transmitted down from the balloon above being received by the operator in front of the armory.The ground operator rapidly tapped out an answer on his own keys. A shout went up. The experiment was a success. This became the first time in history that a telegram had been transmitted from the sky to the ground. Professor Lowe sent the following message to President Lincoln:

 

Balloon Enterprise, in the Air

June 18, 1861

To His Excellency Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States

 

Dear Sir:

From this point of observation we command an extent of county nearly fifty miles in diameter. I have the pleasure of sending you this first telegram ever dispatched from an aerial station, and acknowledging indebtedness to your encouragement for the opportunity of demonstrating the availability of the science of aeronautics in the service of the country, I am your excellency’s obedient servant.

                                                          T.S.C. Lowe

 

     The ground operator sent up a message that the reception was perfect. An formal announcement of the successful link up was made, and everyone cheered again. Encouraged by his accomplishment, Lowe and his assistants stayed aloft for the better part of an hour, sending and receiving messages that were relayed to various points including the War Department, General Winfield Scott, Alexandria, Virginia, and the balloonist’s wife Leontine back in Philadelphia. For Lowe it was a masterpiece of public relations, greatly strengthening his position as chief candidate for the yet to be created position of head of the aeronautical corps.  But there was still much more to be gotten out of this show.

         Signaling his crew, Lowe had the Enterprise  hauled closer to the ground. Then, with the three men still in the basket, and enthusiastically waving small U.S. flags, the balloon was towed, bobbing in triumph, through the streets now lined with wildly cheering crowds to the White House. There President Lincoln greeted the balloon group from out a second-story window. After shaking hands with the president, Lowe had the basket lowered to the ground, and the still inflated balloon moored on the White House lawn. Upon disembarking, the ebullient Lowe found a personal note of congratulations waiting for him from Abraham Lincoln, and an invitation to supper.

         That evening a triumphant T. S. C. Lowe, trying his best to restrain his hyperbole, dined with the president and several members of the cabinet. When the meal was finished, the president remarked that he was extremely interested in Lowe’s scheme for organizing a corps of observation balloons. Lincoln requested that the balloonist remain after the others had departed. The president indicated he wanted to discuss the time it would take to get the corps operational and details of its employment. He was especially intrigued by Lowe’s plan to direct the fire of artillery from the air, thereby enabling gunners to shell targets they could not even see.

         Lincoln and Lowe talked well into the night. As the hour was rather late and, despite all the military presence, Washington was not the safest town, the president suggested to Lowe he was welcome to stay at the White House. Honored to be the president’s guest T. S. C. Lowe readily accepted the invitation. President Lincoln, wearied with the cares of the Nation, showed the balloonist to his room and said good night. Although the bed was larger, and more comfortable than the one in his room at the National Hotel, and he was tired from the toil and excitement of the day, Lowe did not sleep well. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling excited by, and yet fearful of, the prospect of becoming the founder, and head, of a new branch of the military service.

 

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copyright © 2006 Stephen Poleskie

 

 

The Balloonist: The Story of T. S. C. Lowe, Inventor, Scientist, Magician, and Father of the U.S. Air Force by Stephen Poleskie Category: Fiction / Historical Format: Hardcover, 368 pages On Sale: January 2007 Price: $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-929490-27-1 Click on the above for more information about the book and the author.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: Stephen Poleskie, T.S.C. Lowe, Abraham Lincoln, Washington D. C. Mall, Civil War, ballooning, The Balloonist

ONE MORE TIME

A Poem by

Stephanie Poesie

 

If I could drive

yet one more time down the highway of my youth.

One hundred miles per hour, hoping that

some officer would dare to stop me.

Through towns with names like Nanty Glow

where no one lives, but trucks take feed.

And Berwick, with its factory making tanks for the military

that he refused to serve, and later subway cars

we rode in our pinch-penny youth.

All day and all night long,

roaring along the river, that roars along the road.

And I, passing through for one more time, my own

Spring, Summer, and Fall.

But now Winter comes,

and I move slowly.

 

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Stephanie Poesie is a short story writer and poet. She has studied at Black Mountain College and the New School. Her poetry has appeared in The Flatlander Review, New Voices from Nowhere, and Streetlights, among others. She presently lives in Ithaca, New York.

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Sidney Grayling, editor

 

 

 

WHOSE NAME ANYWAY?

THE NOVEMBER 24-30 ISSUE OF THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY contained an article by John Sutherland concerning the problems of the  British crime novelist Jake Arnott, whose latest book Johnny Come Home, was first published in April of 2006, only to be pulled off the market in August of the same year.

It seems that in this book, set in London's tin pan alley of the 1970s, Arnott named one of his characters Tony Rocco. Tony was a former big-band singer now turned impresario. While I have not read the book, Sutherland assures use that the fictional Rocco is depicted as a big-time pervert, and quite nasty. Unfortunately there is a real Tony Rocco, who has emerged out of obscurity, a former big-band singer and a figure of unimpeachable respectability.

Mr. Rocco has brought a suit against Arnott and his publisher, Hodder & Stoughton. And so the book has been pulped. At a loss to the publisher of thousands of dollars, the sum of which must be surely covered by liability insurance. The book will be reprinted with appropriate name changes. I am told that Arthur Hailey checked the names of his characters in the Manhattan telephone directory. Perhaps a more appropriate method these days might be an Internet search.

Sutherland informs us that "Where real names are involved an author cannot hide behind that all purpose shield: 'any resemblance is purely coincidental.' Nor do the courts accept ignorance as a defense. If you can be shown, by using a real-life name, to have injured a real-life reputation, then you will pay. The law is alongside the Bard," Sutherland quips, quoting Shakespeare: "He who steals my purse steals trash. But he who steals my good name steals all that I have.

The author is safe if his character has no good name to lose. Sutherland gives as an example Giles Foden lampooning Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, even though the exiled Amin was still alive and living in Saudia Arabia. The article also points out that authors such as Evelyn Waugh and James Joyce took great pleasure in introducing introducing the names of particular enemies into their fiction, but kept them in small nooks and corners of their novels, where there appearance became more of a private joke to their friends. Then law suits were not so easily instituted as nowadays, which was probably for the better.

Sidney Grayling.

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GOOCHA

a short story

Etienne Espye 

GOOCHA CAME HOME WITH an arrow in him. He knew he was home, but couldn’t get through the cat door as the shaft was sticking out both sides of his body. A good cat, he sat at the back door waiting for Josa to return, but she was at the other house. Goocha didn’t know that.

            Goocha couldn’t have gone to the other house if he wanted to. It was too far away, three hours by car. He had liked the other house when he lived there by the lake with Josa and Jan. Now Jan was gone and he and Josa lived in this small town in the mountains, where there was only one grocery store which did not stock brand of cat food he required, so his bowel movements had become loose, and he gagged up quite frequently. It was also a town where frustrated, or perhaps just bored, deer hunters shot arrows at any small creature that moved. 

            Initially it had almost been fun. Goocha had never seen a bow hunter in his former hometown by the lake, which banned all hunting, except that done by cats. The first arrow that came his way while he was stalking a squirrel in the woods had missed. Here was something different, something he had not seen before. The long straight stick had come from the man very fast, and with a twang and then a hiss. Now it stuck into the ground at a strange angle. On the other end was something that looked like feathers from a bird. Goocha knew about birds. He hunted them; not that he ever caught one. He had once, and Josa had taken it from him, and scolded him telling him he “mustn't do that.” So now when he waited for them in ambush, and dived out of his cover, he only scattered them into the sky, holding up if it seemed like he might actually get one. He did the same thing with squirrels, even though no one had warned him against catching them. After all, he had plenty of food at home in his dish, which Josa always kept filled.

            The sound of the arrow had startled Goocha, and caused him to break off his chase of the squirrel, a change of track that probably saved his life. Now, he heard the swishing sound again, and quickly dived under some ferns. The arrow stuck in a tree trunk, vibrating just above his head. The man walked toward him, then stopped to pull his first stick out of the ground. Goocha took advantage of the man’s distraction and scooted for home, careful to keep his tail down.

            It was a new game to play, he thought. No one had ever harmed Goocha, or even threatened him; although he had had his tail accidentally stepped on once. He had no fear. Then one day, while chasing a squirrel, Goocha saw one of the arrows find the little animals back. The squirrel was pinned in place. It tried to run, but eventually realized it was going nowhere. Then it shuddered and went stiff. Goocha watched from his concealment as the man came to claim his stick, and the skewered squirrel was pulled off and thrown into the brush. The cat went looking for his friend, wanting to know what had happened to him. Spying the squirrel trashing behind some bushes, Goocha approached cautiously, stalking through the low grass in a crouch, with his ears back. He was near, but now the grass had given way to a grave path. Caution told him he must hurry across this open space. In the middle of the path he felt one of the sticks go through him. He tried to run, but could only drag his back legs behind him. His body hurt, like it had never hurt before, and now fluid was coming out of him, warm fluid which he licked at with his tongue. Not knowing what else to do, he hid in the bushes until the hunter was gone, then he crawled home to find Josa. He knew she would help him, as she always did. But she wasn’t home. Goocha waited at the back door for three hours, and then he died.

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Etienne Espye was born in Paris in 1938, and moved to the U. S. A. with his parents just after the Germans invaded Poland. Etienne grew up in New York City where he attended public schools, and took night classes at the New School for Social Research. He presently lives in Upstate New York, where he works as a part-time cat sitter. 

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A RAID AT THE G

a short story

S. Francis Pringle

 

THE PINE GLADE INN, an old stone tavern standing next to the two lane highway that ran between the river bridge and the mall, had become the main watering hole for our small college’s underage drinkers.  Despite its name, The Pine Glade Inn possessed neither pine trees nor a glade. Peter, the owner, was fond of explaining away this apparent inconsistency. “In revolutionary times, before the farmers cut down all the trees, this tavern did stand in a cool glade of pines, where travelers could rest their horses,” he would expound, hoping his customers had not noticed the date 1938 on the tavern’s cornerstone as they came in. “Well, my name is Peter Rams,” the innkeeper would reveal, pausing to wipe the bar with a sour rag, allowing his listeners a moment to think about this fact before delivering the punch line: “Now, I couldn’t very well have named this place The Peter Rams Inn. . . .” This usually brought a curious look and perhaps a grunt from the customer, but Peter always laughed.

Few outsiders visited our town as nothing ever happened here, but those who did knew “The Glade” and made it their hangout, probably because, besides the college students, the place attracted an abundance of town girls known for their beauty, and their putatively loose morals. Prize winning poets, and writers-in-residence, although there were fewer of them now as the college was facing severe budget cuts, often gyrated on the dance floor among college kids clad in sweatshirts displaying the logos of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. The only people wearing the name of the local school, Trumpett College, were the town girls, who didn’t go there anyway.

A kind of caste system existed among the students at Trumpett. The students who had transferred from some other school, where they  bought their logo gear at the campus store rather than from a mail order catalog, having flunked out before coming to Trumpett, considered themselves superior to those students who had gone directly to the local institution. The two groups did not interact socially; in fact they were rather hostile to one another. Although Trumpett College had been my only choice, the one school my parents could afford, I was, because of my friendship with a transfer student named Hank Kolada, allowed to mingle, if only incidentally, with this group.

Outside my window the early winter’s night was being dampened by a gentle snow as I hurried to finish typing a term paper before going out for the evening. Across town my friend Hank would be shivering in his yellow rain slicker, as the volunteer Civil Defense Policeman waved his red baton-flashlight at the steady line of cars coming and going around a three ton boulder that had slid down a cut in the road and was occupying the southbound lane of Route 609. In another hour Hank would be off duty, and meeting me at The Glade for a beer. No one was scheduled to replace Hank Kolada; the cars would just have to get around the rock on their own, which they seemed to be capable of doing when he wasn’t there. Hank didn’t let the fact that his task was rather make-work to keep him from botching up a more serious job bother him. He enjoyed playing policeman, which was why Hank was a volunteer. Hank hoped to become a law enforcement officer when he graduated from Trumpett, the third college he had attended, which made him a kind of super hero among the transfer students. Plus, his father was the chief of police in Shankerburg, the township where The Glade was located.

Everyone, at least everyone under the legal drinking age of 21, professed to be Hank’s friend. If The Glade was going to be raided, they reasoned, Hank Kolada would be sure to know about it. The sight of Hank hunkered over the bar nursing his beer brought considerable comfort to the minds of those customers whose real ages did not match the ages on the ID cards in their wallets.

Looking out, my breath frosted the window. I imagined Hank tugging his slicker tighter around his neck against the cold, and checking his watch. Hank too liked to hang out with the “fast” crowd at The Glade. It gave him a sense of importance that someone who had already flunked out of two colleges by the age of twenty desperately needed. Unfortunately, Hank and I had been less welcome at the Glade since perpetrating our hoax.

It had been Hank’s idea. I still wonder how I had the temerity to agreed to the bizarre scheme, perhaps because I was rarely asked by anyone to participate in anything. Hank, as a volunteer Civil Defense Policeman, displayed an official-looking rack of warning lights on the roof of his car. He also carried in the trunk a complete store of emergency gear: helmets, yellow slickers, nightsticks, flashlights, whistles, hand-held radios; a mini police station complete with everything but guns.

The Glade, as a widely-known underage drinking spot, operated in constant fear of being raided by the Liquor Control Board, its young patrons speculating on how much of their nightly tab went into paying off whoever was being paid off, and when these payments mightrun out, and the curtain brought down. But this risk was part of the attraction of drinking at The Glade, a frisson that made the beer taste sweeter there than the same beer drunk from a can in a parked car, or out of a paper at a fraternity party.

Hank, nicknamed “Pina” to his chagrin, possessed of a strange sense of humor anyway, and perhaps to spite those insiders at the tavern who regularly mocked him, especially the owner Peter the inventor of his tag “Pina Kolada”, contrived to orchestrate a mock raid on his favorite drinking establishment.

The Friday night before the Homecoming Parade, wearing his Civil Defense Police slicker and helmet, and blowing a whistle, Hank had burst through the double front door of The Glade, the warning lights on his car flooding the background with flashing red and blue, its siren howling like the dogs from hell, and shouted through a bullhorn: “Don’t anybody move this is a raid!”

For a moment dancers on the polished floor froze in place, chuggers halted in mid chug-a-lug, the good times hung suspended. Then a crescendo of too young drinkers panicked for the side exit, where I, in similar faux police costume, had taken up my position also blowing a whistle, and rapping on the window with a billy club. Seeking an escape the crowd  in the back room had bolted through the kitchen, and out the back door, which to their grief opened on a field that had been freshly fertilized with barn manure.

Clambering on an overturned wastebasket a ex-Yaleman got stuck trying to squeeze out the men’s room window. Harvard and Princeton sweatshirt wearers were found cowering on the toilet seat, the stall door locked.

At the first blast of Hank’s whistle Peter and his wife had fled up the backstairs, seeking sanctuary in their apartment above, where they would claim they had been all night, planning to place all the blame on their newly hired bartender.

The bogus attack lasted less than a minute: Hank, now Pina again, throwing off his helmet and yelling, “Surprise”.  But before I could also reveal the joke, all of the underaged patrons, which meant most of the patrons, excluding those still hiding in the toilets, or out back running through cowpie up to their ankles, had rushed past me and gotten into their cars and fled.

The rest of the night was rather quiet at The Glade. Hank and I apologized profusely for our joke, which all agreed was in poor taste. Peter swore we were banned from his establishment forever, only relenting when he remembered how useful it was to have the son of the local police chief as a regular customer.

I was allowed back into The Glade perhaps because I was Hank’s best friend, or so everyone thought. Of all the people Hank Kolada knew there must have a dozen or so closer to him than me, but none, I suppose, quite as desperate and gullible as I was then.

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S. Francis Pringle is a writer who lives in upstate New York. He has published numerous short stories. including one in the June issue of this journal. A RAID AT THE G is an excerpt from a longer work.

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Sidney Grayling, Editor 

 

 

 

 

Four - A Portfolio

AT TWELVE

Jan Wroclaw

She bends her head

over her tablet, drawing

splendid maidens and silky

steeds that surely fly.

 

Outside the room

wars rise and fall again.

 

THE VERY LAST LILAC

Jan Wroclaw

There are all these gods,

these voices that went dead,

all these reasons why

we forget

 

some sons will rape

and some will kill,

and sons will weep

for what happens to the seed.

 

BARTONSVILLE IDYLL

Kenneth Oldmixon

Fire Is.

It fills the road with sun

striking cries of children, forging

fields to copper sung

with a clang of children.

 

Come brazen as the grain

banging your thighs and ring

your hair,

make me the liturgy of seed.

 

KETURAH CANDY (1858-1869)

Kenneth Oldmixon

Hello lover! How does it go

down there? All stone and leather?

Or settled to the mulch of our

best years. Do shards of lace

tease the tunnels of your bones?

I need to touch and thrill a rise

of skull to know if laughter

leaves a scar or tears erode

some way out, to trace

my maze of now become, a face,

although it hardly matters.

 

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These poems are from a portfolio printed in 1989 at AXIAL PRESS in Hublersburg, Pennsylvania, by Richard Rutkowski. Twenty-four sets were made. The portfolio was hand printed by Rutkowski using the silk-screen process. There were also four illustrations by E. M. Hollis. The poems and illustrations were all created by Rutkowski himself, and attribituted to the various imaginary authors. Richard Rutkowski died several years ago, and AXIAL PRESS is no longer in operation.

SG

What Fiction Asks Us To Remember

By Jeanne Mackin

Think of history as narrative. Think of historical fiction as expanded narrative, history with all the trimmings, with cause and effect, speculation, personalization. Think of expanded narrative as the story teller reaching out to you, saying, ‘pay attention. This is important.” Or as novelist Jeanette Winterson repeats over and over in The Passion, ‘Trust me. I’m telling you a story,’ and then as she relates a Napoleonic narrative of a Venetian woman who walks on water, you do believe her even as you know she is lying through her teeth, because that is what novelists do. But this important: you don’t believe that Venetian women necessarily walk on water (though it would be a convenient skill, considering global warming and the state of Venetian canals) but you do believe Winterson’s message that love changes us, that war changes us and that war is not conducive to happy endings, because that is what her story is really about.

We best believe what we remember, and narrative is about memory: giving memories in the form of stories, receiving memories and adding them to our personal stores. But historical fiction, as memory creation, asks us to do the impossible, to remember experiences we can’t possibly have had, to ‘remember’ the smell of the rosebush growing outside Hester Prynne‘s jail in Hawthorne‘s The Scarlet Letter, to remember crouching in darkness outside the mead hall, the perpetual outsider, as John Gardner’s Grendel does; to remember the sensation of the earthquake that begins the action of Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica; to remember the wild vines strangling the decaying plantation in Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. All of those things were before our times; yet having read them, we remember them.

There is a relationship between memory and freedom, asserts Dr. Chris Nunn, author of De La Mettrie’s Ghost: the Story of Decisions. Nunn examines free will and the decision making process and ultimately concludes that “stories…are the mediators of free choice.” He argues that people whose ‘memories are more malleable should, other things being equal, be less prone to conditions like milleniarianism “{belief that the world will end on a given date simply because of the date} and other forms of private or mass delusion. People with flexible memories are less gullible…“thanks to its intimate relationship with the memory process, consciousness can to some extent determineits own future.”

Call me an idealist, but perhaps fiction can prevent us from making even bigger and more dangerous idiots of ourselves than the species already has. Perhaps historical fiction keeps our memories malleable by constantly recreating and adding to those memories; perhaps there is a connection between fiction, memory and freedom. Gardner’s Grendel can be read as an early eco-novel, among other things: “They {man} hacked down trees in widening rings around their central halls and blistered the land with peasant huts and pigpen fences till the forest looked like an old dog dying of mange.”

In Jean Rhys’ postcolonial devastation in Wide Sargasso Sea, the destructive misery of failed empire comes home to roost in a suicidal conflagration: “I got up, took the keys and unlocked the door. I was outside holding my candle. Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draught for the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage.”

Richard Hughes’ incredibly convincing narrative of the connections between entitlement and violence in A High Wind in Jamaica reveals how a lack of self-responsibility so easily leads to murder and how that violence estranges us: “Mr. Thornton made no attempt to answer her questions: he even shrank back, physically from touching his child Emily..Was it Conceivable she as such an idiot as really not to know what it was all about? Could she possibly not know what she had done? He stole a look at her innocent little face, even the tear-stains now gone. What was he to think?”

Murdered pirates, decaying plantations, mead halls, Napoleon’s roasted chickens…artificial memories bestowed by historical fiction, but who’s to say that an artificial memory is less meaningful than mundane ones? De La Mettrie argues that memories become encoded in neurons and have physical properties, so why can’t the memories acquired in a reading of fiction matter as much as the memory of today’s first cup of coffee and who poured it for you? Read, and remember. Is it possible to also understand something from what is given us by the memories in fiction? “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us,” Eugene O’Neill tells us in Long Day’s Journey into Night. Perhaps what fiction most asks us to remember is that memory keeps us human, and if we remember enough and remember well, we can add an e to human.

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Jeanne Mackin is the author of several historical novels including The Sweet By and By and The Frenchwoman.  She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Goddard College.  mackinja@aol.com

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SG